Back up email from Office 365 to PST

Introduction

I had a cutover migration go bad and it ended up in production for a day. The solution was to wipe and start over after filtering the on-premise GAL. This required backing up all emails that came in that day to a single PST file. After wiping and then starting over, the migration was successful.

This How-To covers the steps necessary to set up rights and export the email to PST for safe keeping.

Steps
(5 total)

1

Setup a new Global Admin user to run this export

Log in to the Office 365 portal and create a new user. This user needs to have a mailbox, so if you are out of licenses, you can either purchase one, or add a trial with Exchange, or use an existing account with a mailbox and make it Global Admin.

2

Edit Exchange Discovery Export Permissions

Now you need to setup the Discovery management role to allow Mailbox Import Export. Open the admin portal and drill down to Exchange then Permissions, Admin roles, and choose Discovery Management to edit it.

Under the Roles Section, hit the plus sign and add Mailbox Import Export to the list. Then, add your new or existing Global Admin WITH A MAILBOX to the list and hit Save.

3

Setup the Export Batch With or Without Filtering

In this example, I needed a complete dump for all 26 mailboxes with all emails received on the day that the migration would not sync mailboxes. This was needed so I could wipe the tenant clean and start over. So this example has no filtering, but you can filter by individual mailbox or all mailboxes for a specific time frame. This is all under your control and will vary with your needs and Scope of Work.

4

Wait for Batch Estimate to Complete Scan

Depending on how many mailboxes and how much data you are exporting, you will need to wait until the batch shows a green check with the estimated data set size. Once that is completed, then you can click the download arrow to start the PST export module. This will be a quick download within IE, and you have to click install to get it to show. The engine then exports and downloads the data to One PST, so be ready to have that space available. Also note, this does not preserve any folder structure and is a pure raw dump of the data.

5

Create a Shared Mailbox and Import

In this example, I had 150MB of emails from 26 mailboxes for about 8 hours of email. I created a shared mailbox then shared it out to everyone and imported this PST so the end users could get any important emails. This might not be ideal for some due to security / privacy concerns but in my situation it was allowed.

Conclusion

This is not a hard process, but it has some steps that I was not aware were needed to allow this type of export. I realize this is not ideal, because it lacks folder structure, contacts and calendar, but email backup even this basic is valuable, so I wanted to share with the community.

That's what I thought but this example was a G2 license so I think things are changing again at Microsoft with this feature. Curious, can you check your tenants and see if you can do this and with what subscriptions you are successful with. I am going to test my Nonprofit ones later and report back.

yes it had the feature for all mailboxes or just a subset in the batch setup so you can limit it to just that. The one rub is it is a raw dump without folders or calendar and contacts so this is just email and it is raw like what a lawyer would need for a case.

That was a question I had as it seems they opened this feature up to other license levels and I was curious to have the community test those boundaries and report back here so we all know what does and does not have this.
Also keep in mind this is a RAW dump of just EMAIL like what a lawyer would request for a case and does NOT include contacts or calendars, and does not retain any folder structures.